Recently, a conference system has become increasingly popular, which enables a remote conference between different locations. In the remote conference system, a communication terminal obtains and collects images and sounds by shooting an attendee and recording his voice, converts the collected analog data into digital data, and transmits them to another party's terminal. The remote conference system can create, by displaying the image of one attendee on a display such as a video screen in a conference room of another attendee, an atmosphere as if the attendee is in a meeting room and talks with the other attendee.
In addition, the remote conference system knows a state of a candidate terminal before starting the conference by transmitting status information representing whether the candidate terminal is online or not to a terminal which has transmitted a start request for the conference. Because the terminal may know that the destination terminal is offline and cannot respond after the transmission of the start request, it may be prevented that the start request for the conference becomes a useless procedure.
In addition, a technology is known to automatically align destination candidates so that an online terminal is positioned at the top of a list and an offline terminal is listed at the bottom of the list (e.g. Patent Document 1).
When a communication status of the destination candidate changes while displaying a destination selection screen, a conventional communication terminal for the remote conference may employ one of the following display control methods:
(1) Position Fixed—selected position is fixed (pointed position with a cursor is fixed) and
(2) Keep Selected—the destination candidate is kept selected (pointed position moves depending on changes of the display positions of the destination candidates).
The above two methods both have issues. In the position fixed method, since the selected position is fixed, once the display positions of the destination candidates are changed, the selected terminal may be changed. Thus, it is inconvenient when the user desires to confirm a communication status of a specific destination candidate.
In the keep selected method, the selected position may be changed depending on a change of display position of the destination candidate which has been selected at first. Thus, it is inconvenient when the user desires to sort the list by online status of the destination candidates.